Outlined below are the easiest ways to use the proxies you find here or the ones you find yourself.

Please NOTE:

SCANNING IS ILLEGAL. USING PROXIES WITHOUT PERMISSION IS ILLEGAL. JUST BECAUSE SOME IDIOT HAS MISCONFIGURED THEIR COMPUTER DOESN'T MEAN YOU ARE ALLOWED TO USE IT. If you are reported by these people to your ISP, you may LOSE YOUR account.

A proxy server acts as a gateway between you and the Internet. With a proxy server enabled on your Web browser, your request for a web page (or a download) goes first to the proxy server, where it checks if someone had previously accessed that page (or download). If it finds one, then it will just give it to you from the proxy server -- that makes loading a page or downloading something significantly faster. If the proxy server doesn't detect an already existing page or download, it will go out to the Internet, get the page or download, and give it to you. Since it is the proxy server that actually connects to the site you are viewing or downloading from, it is the IP of the proxy that is left in the remote server's logs, and not the IP that you are currently using.

Many proxy servers keep logs of the IP's that have connected to them, however, if you use a proxy physically located in a country that is not especially friendly with the one in which you reside, it can make it difficult for someone to obtain the logs, even with a subpoena. You can increase the level of difficulty by "chaining" proxies, or having one proxy connect to another proxy. To maximize the difficulty of tracing the originating IP, each proxy should be located in a different country.

The best countries to use are generally Mexico, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Russia and Czech Republic.

To use a proxy server with Internet Explorer.

1. Open up Internet Explorer.

2. Go to the View menu and select Internet Options.

3. A window will appear with several tabs along the top. Click on the
Connection tab.

4. Click settings, then Use proxy server for this connection add the address and port and press ok.

To use a proxy server with Netscape Communicator.

1. Open up Communicator.

2. Go to the Edit menu and select Preferences.

3. A window will now appear, with your options listed on the left-hand
side. Double-click on the word Advanced.

4. When you click on Advanced, three options will appear: Cache,
Proxies, and SmartUpdate. Click on Proxies.

5. You'll now see some options with radio buttons beside them. Click on the radio button beside "Manual proxy configuration" to select it.

One SIMPLE way to "chain" proxies is to enter the information for one proxy directly into your browser's proxy configuration setup. Then connect to a web anonymizer which is also a proxy, and from there, to the site you want to view. Anyone trying to trace your actual IP would now have to subpoena the logs from TWO proxy servers. You could chain in a third proxy server by entering it into the address bar of your browser, in conjunction with the URL of the web anonymizer. The URL that you type should look something like this:

This would, in effect, connect you to proxy A, the one specified in your browser configuration, then to proxy B, then to proxy C, and finally, to the web anonymizer, from where you would enter the URL of the site you want to visit, using FOUR proxy servers chained together.

This does not work with all proxies, and finding publicly accessible proxy servers is becoming more difficult.

1. In the service menu, click on new. enter 'Chain' as name and '8000' as port to accept connections on.

2. Click on new and fill in the ips of the fastest wingates you found, but this time, use port 1080 for this (and not the port 23).

3. Using the '<' and '>', you can add and remove socks. be sure to test all socks one by one before adding them all to the list in once, because if one of them is bad, you chain will not work and you will not be able to locate the bad socks in the chain.

4. If all of them seem to work, you use the '<' key to add them all mind speed problems. 4 or less is fine. i think 10 or 13 is the limit put by TCP/IP).

Wingate scanner works better through SocksCAP (mentioned above) as something PH can crash when being used through SocksCAP. The point of scanning through a proxy is that it's less likely you'll get in trouble for scanning.

Which is used for testing the relative speeds of mirrors, but also can be used for checking proxies.

Just fire off Dipstick. Rightclick in the small green rectangular and choose Show main window. To import a list of wingates, just click on Advanced, choose Import List and select your file. You can also manually ping a simple host by clicking on Manual Ping. Use those wingates with the smallest average time.

Well, obviously the system can be used to defeat itself. Picking a
proxy in 4 different countries and chaining them together will create
such a web of beaurocracy, it won't even matter if it's illegal or not...

Whoah That was quite a good read. And shows how much i knew about proxys. well i knew the basics but not about chaining. This would have been helpful awhile back when i had some smart arse quoting all my Ip stats my service provider and norrowing it down the the town i lived in.
Thanks

At the top of the post you say that using a open proxy is illegal but a couple months later in the other sticky thread "Legal Info Regarding Using Open Proxies" you say its legal. Might be best if you delete the one line at the top of this thread to prevent the inconsistency.

methods of proxy chaining don't work in the more recent versions of IE. Multiproxy at http://www.multiproxy.org/ supports proxy chaining and is free. I haven't tried it but it seems to be fairly popular.

The proxies must be HTTP connect proxies. If they support SSL or SOCKS then it will work. If you can login to hotmail.com then it supports SSL. Another problem you could run into is port filtering. Instead of using proxy1:1080-->proxy2:8000-->proxy3:80 make sure all of the proxies use the same port.

In the end proxy chaining is such a hassle that it would probably be better to go to the library or some public computer and use a anonymous proxy from there.

What I finally did was to get a website and run a CGI proxy.
You can control the HTTP headers from the proxy, kinda like you would from Proximatron on a local machine. Also controls what remote site's can dowload to your local host.